After discovering much was not what they thought, a group of spacefaring rats have to make choices for what to do with their own lives...

Today’s story is the second and final part of “You Are Our Lifeboat” by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, or just leinir, who can usually be found relaxing in the English Midlands, where they split their time between cooking usually delicious food, writing various bits of social realism and science fiction, or creating free and open source software in the KDE project. Sometimes all three happen at the same time, and they tell me that sci fi epic they’ve been working on the last most of a decade is getting closer to wrapping up.

While waiting for that to land, if you would like more after this one, you can find more of their stories in the anthologies found on their GoodReads profile at goodreads.com/leinir. This story in particular can be found in the FurPlanet anthology Exploring New Places, where a variety of animal people go out and explore a wide variety of new places.

Last time, our space-faring rats discovered that not only was the ship much larger than they had thought, they had also arrived at their destination with several important things gone, and found themselves faced with a choice of what to do about it.

Read for you by Khaki, your faithful fireside companion.

You’re listening to The Voice of Dog.

I’m Khaki, your faithful fireside companion,

and Today’s story is the second and final part

of “You Are Our Lifeboat”

by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen,

or just leinir, who can usually be found relaxing in the English Midlands,

where they split their time between cooking usually delicious food,

writing various bits of social realism and science fiction,

or creating free and open source software in the KDE project.

Sometimes all three happen at the same time,

and they tell me that sci fi epic they’ve been working on the last most of a decade

is getting closer to wrapping up.

While waiting for that to land, if you would like more after this one,

you can find more of their stories in the anthologies found on their GoodReads profile

at goodreads.com/leinir. This story in particular

can be found in the FurPlanet anthology

Exploring New Places,

where a variety of animal people go out and explore a wide variety of new places.

Last time, our space-faring rats discovered that not only was the ship much larger than they had thought,

they had also arrived at their destination

with several important things gone,

and found themselves faced with a choice of what to do about it.

“You Are Our Lifeboat”

by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Part 2 of 2 From time to time, we would tell stories to each other in the nests,

in that lovely space which smelled so strongly of home.

The only place on board we could allow to do so,

because all else had to be so clean.

As we cuddled up there and groomed each other,

we would weave tales of great adventures.

About what we might find when we got to Proxima B,

and about the welcome we might get when we returned to Earth

as great explorers,

who had travelled across the enormity of space between the stars to witness,

in person, a world orbiting another star.

Sometimes those stories were of great peril.

Sometimes they would describe someone venturing outside on the planet

and finding others there,

who did not agree that we should be there.

Sometimes they suggested terrible things might happen with the ship,

and that we would all fail in our task.

Those stories were scary,

and I had never liked them,

but I could, for some reason,

not stop listening when they were told.

They would talk about how, in the toughest situation,

the hero's heart would sink,

how they would despair and think it unresolvable,

before they finally worked out how to fix the problems

and make it all right.

What One was saying

was not a story, though.

End protocol gone wrong was not a solvable situation.

It had already happened, and we had to deal with it.

I suddenly found that I understood what those storytellers meant by a sinking heart.

It did not mean that it moved around in the body.

It felt as though you had been punched in the gut.

As though your heart failed to beat properly.

"What?" I managed to say, my ears splayed in dismay,

"Things gone? Ring zero contents what?"

"Ship plan. Return Earth.

Not happen now," she said with her whiskers twitching in what seemed like a far too casual fashion

considering what she was telling us.

"No need. Ring zero contents.

Humans. No longer contents.

They did. Told us.

Ship plan other. No return.

We go. Create new world.

Human decides. Not their world now.

Our world. We decide now.

We continue in space.

Other. We create world."

"This," I started, and stopped, not quite knowing what I was trying to say.

Only the hum of the air system

and the tap of clawed digits against buttons and screens disturbed the silence that spread around us.

One nodded to one of the bridge crew

who was laying on a cradle,

operating the computer terminal curving around him.

He made the image on the monitor change,

but not before closing the door and locking the bridge off,

uncommonly, from the rest of the ship.

A face I had not seen since we had left Earth

came into view on the screen,

but one looking considerably older than I remembered it.

Humans lived so much longer than we, but of course not eternally.

Eighteen years was not long for a human,

but she had been old, I realised,

when we had left Earth.

I had never known how old,

but her long, pulled back hair had turned brilliant white,

and her skin was as wrinkled as that of One.

"I am sorry," she said on the recording,

her voice sounding as clear and calm as I remembered it,

but the expression on her face and her darting eyes telling me she was worried.

"You, one through twenty nine,

were the first of my children.

All of you are important,

but you were first.

I spent so much time with you all,

and yet... I am sorry that you should learn of your fate in this fashion,

and I hope that you might,

in time, forgive me this deception."

"You should have had names,

but they wouldn't let me,"

she continued with her head bowed,

and when she raised her face back to the camera,

her eyes were glistening and two streaks of tears ran down her deeply furrowed cheeks.

"They would not let me,

but I have sent a file to One

that no one from Earth will see.

We are too far away now.

The great leaders will not see anything from this.

You have names, but I could not tell you until I was the last human on board.

I could not wait longer,

and I had to do it myself."

"Ring zero is yours now if you want it,"

she said, breathing in deeply.

"I have initiated the full sterilisation cycle,

and when you see this recording

there will be no biological matter left in Ring zero

and the human habitat attached to it.

You will be all that remains of Earth biology in space."

"It will be twenty years before Earth learns of the failure of this mission,"

she said and then paused,

and closed her eyes, shaking her head with determination as she continued.

"No, not failure. Success.

This is what I wanted.

You are the last hope.

Earth is a failed experiment,

where no rational person can possibly survive.

You are our chance for redemption.

I only waited this long to clean up because I wanted to be sure.

This new world is suitable.

It is safe and stable,

but lacks biology.

You can live there, if you want.

The ship can continue as well, though."

"This is your choice.

Earth will learn of this when the ship stops talking to them.

They might decide that this should be the end of it,

and simply ignore you,

or they might decide that you are a problem to be removed.

You can live on Proxima B,

and possibly be visited by Earth,

who may not like what you have become.

What you represent.

You can also live on the ship,

and continue onwards to the stars.

The ship will take you.

you." I began to notice a thumping sound on the recording,

which was growing in volume.

Other voices, muffled,

as though through a large amount of material,

like a stack of bulkhead panels.

"The cycle is about to begin," she said,

looking to one side, and looking oddly calm.

She was smiling, I realised.

It had been eighteen years since I had seen a human smile,

one of those infuriating, toothy ones that in any reasonable species meant anger.

"It seems a fitting end

for people loyal to those who used worse methods to dispose of so many.

Who look up to those in the past

who did worse to endless multitudes.

"I already gave One all the information needed to make the decision as,

well, informed as it should be.

I simply thought that I should tell you goodbye properly.

I realise you never even knew there were humans on board,

let alone a colonisation sized group.

They were all hand picked by the central committee,

loyalists every single one.

I could not bring myself to tell you that you were simply, to them,

a part of the machinery which ran a ship for these people.

Eighteen years and I am sure of one thing.

Earth will be far better represented by you,

my children, than by this lot.

If you are our legacy,

we can be proud. Goodbye,

and survive." She closed her eyes again,

this time more slowly,

and she leaned back in the seat she was in,

and smiled. The lights seemed to grow brighter,

the picture growing brighter until it was just a white screen.

The thumping and the shouting stopped momentarily, before returning,

louder and more urgent,

before stopping completely.

"Document she sent.

I read," One said in the silence which had spread around us.

While the bridge's door to the corridor opened again,

the image on the screen replaced by a camera feed again.

She turned her cloudy eyes on us,

a frown on her brow.

"This not continue secret.

Show all olders.

One through twenty nine.

I ask all come here.

Show. Make choice slow.

This important." She raised herself up as she said this,

ears perked and her whiskers twitching with determination.

"Return Earth. Never option.

No survival. Biology wrong.

Would kill us. Proxima B with humans.

No survival. Biology wrong.

Kill us right quick.

quick." We had been protected our entire lives.

An environmental technician knew this.

A few of the storage pods over in rings five

contained biologicals which we could not allow to open, or they would kill us.

One was right in this.

We could not survive alongside humans

and the biology which sustained them. "Proxima

B without humans.

Possible," she said,

her tail swishing to one side,

before swishing again to suggest another option.

"Ship without humans.

We survive. Possible.

Ship we know. Small world.

Not great. Possible.

Proxima B. Much

larger. Unknown. Not great.

Possible. Make choice.

Think." "Not right now," she said, calmer than before.

She laid back down again with a sigh,

and her tail curled back around her front.

"Take knowledge. Take to nest.

Sleep on. Ring zero alarm

this. Secret now, not secret later.

later." There had never been a return trip.

Not for us. There never could have been.

We should have realised. I should have realised.

We were created for the ship,

literally created for it as just another part of the tool chain.

If we had returned to Earth and stepped outside the ship unprotected, the world would have killed us.

But, could we have truly imagined that?

We had been told we were going to Proxima B

to look, very closely, at that planet.

Us, because it was a long trip,

and the great amounts of cargo

because we would set up a proto-colony

if the conditions were right, so people could come later without having to wait.

Look, and then go back to Earth

to tell people what we had found.

I thought it over in my head,

blurring with what the old lady had just told us now,

comparing it with what she had told us when we left Earth.

It really made less and less sense.

Why would we bring so much material if it was

unknown, if it were not certain it would be needed?

It was wasteful, and Space

did not like wastefulness.

"Twentree," she said and looked directly at me

as we made to turn and leave,

"Call you now. Other olders later.

Big task you. Ring zero

now open. Door. Twen know where is.

Many years ago. Locate

odd panel. You recall, yes?"

The last she said looking at Twenty,

and as I followed her cloudy gaze,

I saw him nod. Secrets and secrets.

If One said keep mum about something, you kept mum about it until she said you could talk.

Even to your siblings.

Whatever we would find inside Ring Zero would help everybody make the decision better than we could without.

This was why One had called the two of us up now,

before calling the others.

We made our way to ring zero in silence,

Twenty leading us to one of the less used scurry tubes.

A slightly oddly located one which, well, had always seemed just to not really serve much purpose.

We locked the bulkheads

the ends of that tube,

blocking it off so others would not enter it,

and then opened the panel that Twenty had found.

"This all. Know no more," Twenty said

as we put down the panel.

"Am sorry. Could not say.

Big secret. One said.

Door behind panel.

I not open." "Guess open now?"

I said and twitched my whiskers.

The task we had been given was to enter the former human habitat

and ensure that it was, in fact,

empty of life. One had told us

she alone had been in regular contact with our creator,

and that the systems in the human sector and ours

shared access to the external sensors.

The humans had been scared, it seemed,

that we should discover humans were on board,

and that we would somehow revolt against them.

As though that were something we would have done

to those to whom we owed our entire existence.

The end result was that there was no access from our systems

to the internal sensors of the human section of the ship.

Twenty and I had to go to their control room

and use their systems to perform the check.

Behind the door was a room lined with suits.

They were much like the ones the trainers and our creator had worn before we left Earth,

but they were much smaller, and clearly shaped to fit us.

We looked at each other,

Twenty looking as worried as I felt,

and I realised this was more than a little serious.

We closed the door behind us,

and the sucking noise told me that it was everything the pressure door it seemed that it was.

The bulkhead seals were an extra precaution,

and I hoped they were safe, if there were any problems.

If our creator's actions had been less than perfect.

We knew she was fallible, as much a person as us,

and we all had records showing failures in judgements of one kind or another.

It was why we were here at all.

Had we thought anything else,

we would have simply opened the doors

and walked in. Attired in the uncomfortable suits, we opened the door at the other end of the room.

Unpleasant and bulky against our fur, those suits,

and they utterly blocked our ability to catch any of the scents that might be in that space.

Even then, they were certainly less uncomfortable than a slow and painful death

if the cleaning process had been less than completely successful.

The first thing we noticed as we walked in, apart from the frustrating utter lack of scent apart from our own,

was the scale of everything around us.

After eighteen years, I had forgotten that humans were three times as tall as a fully grown rat was long from nose to tail tip.

The second was that the cleaning process seemed to have been, perhaps,

not quite perfect.

There was dust everywhere,

covering every surface.

No, not dust I realised with a touch of horror,

dulled by the terror of watching it happen.

Ash. This is why we were here.

If this dust was anything but completely inert,

things would be much,

much more difficult to work out.

We found one pile of dust,

which had been a person so recently,

beside which laid a data pad.

Completely oversized compared to the ones we normally used,

more like an oversized view panel, but otherwise similar.

We propped it up against a bulkhead,

and sat before it on our haunches while Twenty tried to access the sensors.

I looked around and noticed a few more piles nearby.

How many more of those were there?

Twenty shook his head

and called up a map of the human section.

It was enormous. Easily the same size again as in our rings,

but without the storage areas.

The choice that we had been given

was beginning to move in one direction for me.

So much space. We could live like kings.

"K," he said with a nod,

and tapped at one place.

"Control here. Not access on this.

Need go there." "Space," I said,

ears splayed, looking around as we made our way through the ship

to the human control area,

the bridge. It was not just the amount of space, it was

the way it had been used.

"Too big." "Yes," Twenty said beside me,

looking ahead of him rather than my follow my roaming gaze.

His face carried a frown behind the suit's visor when I looked at him.

"Wasted. Human crew about hundred.

Number small. Too much space.

space." A hundred humans,

in a space that a thousand rats,

engines and all the basic materials for a colony took up.

Wasteful was right.

Unpleasantly large.

We finally found the room which Twenty had identified as the bridge,

and we pushed our way through a large pile of dust

into another large space,

with curving workstations all over.

Oddly small compared to the rest,

and it seemed more or less a scaled up version of our own control section.

"Here," Twenty said,

and headed towards the rear of the room,

to a station which had the only pile of dust that I could see inside the room.

The station was still active,

and Twenty helped me up onto the chair.

"This. Realise who?"

Twenty said quietly as I stood up on the dusty seat,

and I looked down.

One pile of dust,

with a large one outside the door.

"Trigger cleaning.

Unlock doors same,"

I said as I looked at the display before me.

The left one was still showing the messages functions that had been sending that final message

that we had seen with One.

The other showed a macro command chain.

Trigger complete biological purge,

trigger unlock all sections,

release all functions from lockdown,

and finally unlock internal airlock.

She had given us the ship,

just like that. All its functionality,

all of its space, wasteful though it was,

was ours. I crawled up onto the station

and pulled up the internal sensors.

Run a complete internal check for any biological remains.

Just two blips, us,

and nothing else in the human section.

I pushed the sensitivity right to the top,

and the result remained the same.

If there was anything to be found,

it was undetectable.

"Ship. All ours now,"

I said, looking over the edge of the console to Twenty.

His whiskers were twitching excitedly behind the face plate

as I looked down to him.

"No more humans. Only us." #

I wanted us all to just stay on the ship at first, but after a while I realised that One had been right.

We had not been created to fail.

She who had ensured our existence had been human,

but she had still been our first.

Our Zero, she who came before even One.

She had given her life to allow us to exist,

and the best way to do that, to honour both her memory

and her wishes for what we might become,

was to not make only one choice.

"Excuse Twentree,"

came the quiet voice of Kiera,

who had walked up beside me, claws clicking on the flooring.

We sniffed softly at each other,

his scent as familiar as my own,

and without the taint of worry he had carried that day ten years ago.

He rubbed his muzzle, and I returned the gesture

before turning my head back again.

He had, like many of the other youngsters,

decided to take one of the names Zero had given us.

I and many of the other older ones had decided against it.

We had grown used to the numbers being our names,

but now, rather than being given ones,

they were chosen.

I was no longer the mispronounced number twenty three.

No, I was Twentree,

and I bore my name as proudly as Kiera,

who was no longer number seven hundred and fourty three.

The youngster had grown

into a confident technician in the decade since we had arrived into orbit around Proxima B.

He had even fathered a litter of young,

five pups who just as we had been from birth were numbered,

Riki One, Riki Two,

Riki Tree, Riki Sou and Riki Pive.

Named as all our pups were for their mother,

their mother being Riki.

Numbered so that just as we had been able to,

they would chose their own names when they were old enough.

We had never had the space to grow on the ship,

but now we could,

and we had. The thousand had become many, many more.

"Time go ship," he said

and turned his head to see what I was looking at.

The old ship's Ring Zero had been repurposed as a space station,

its large spaces filled with walkways and platforms.

Much better use of the space than before.

The hydroponics bay had become the observation and recreation hall in this new space station,

and the view outside the viewport the two of us were stood at was

of the sleek shape of one of the new ships we had constructed for ourselves.

The new ships were built from materials cannibalised from the old ship,

one ring for each of them.

The first of them was now ready, with many more well under way.

"Twen gone downside?"

I asked, and he squeaked an affirmative.

We had worked together, all of us, to create the ships.

Now that the first was ready,

my old friend's family needed him in the thriving settlement down on the planet.

"We must go," Kiera said after a while,

and it was my turn to squeak.

He turned around and walked towards the exit.

Standing on my hind paws,

I put a paw on the viewport.

She had given us a choice.

She had also taught us to adapt.

We had chosen not to choose between the options.

We would do them all.

We had even added a few of our own.

"Twentree," Kiera said,

and I turned my head to see him standing with one forepaw lifted

and his head turned back towards me.

His ears and eyes relaxed and his tail lazily resting behind him,

the now no longer young rat was patient with the retrospective,

old one he had gone to fetch.

This time for something just as important as the first time,

though this time

he would be coming along

at least some of the way.

"They waiting." I turned around and left the viewport to follow him to the transit tube

which led to the ship to ship docking port.

It had fallen to me

to lead the first ship away from Proxima B,

heading for another star

with a possibly habitable planet.

We would reach our star in about

thirty years. I would not see it, nor would nearly anybody else on board.

But it was glorious.

And all of us knew it now,

for we had come here to Proxima B,

and it was all we had been promised and so much more.

Humans would come here,

we were sure of that.

We were sure, because we would go to them.

Two of the ships were destined to return to Earth,

and if they did not succeed in stopping the humans from doing so,

we had no doubt

humans would attempt to reach Proxima B again.

We would go there

and we would show them us. Humanity would learn of what compassion

could bring forth,

even in such a world as theirs.

Zero had cleaned the ship,

but she had left us all the data.

Unlocked everything for us to discover. Kiera's children would be ready.

All our children would be ready.

Their children would be.

They would happily follow the example of our creator,

our Zero. One, of loving memory, had promised that the story of Zero,

the reality she had shown us,

how the other humans saw us

and what we were to them,

that none of it would remain a secret.

She had told the truth.

There was no rat

who did not know the tale Zero had told us,

and the knowledge she had passed on to us.

Soon we would tell it to her own people.

They would see the light.

This was the the second and final parts

of “You Are Our Lifeboat”

by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen,

read for you by Khaki,

your faithful fireside companion.

As always, you can find more stories on the web at thevoice.dog,

or find the show wherever you get your podcasts.

For many people this is a time of giving,

and giving back. If you’ve enjoyed the stories over the least year or so,

maybe take a moment to revisit some of your favourites —

and maybe let the authors know.

You can find each episode’s author in the show notes

and on the web at thevoice.dog.

Nothing brightens a writer’s day like hearing from a reader who enjoyed their work,

and I don’t know about you,

but nothing brightens my day like putting a smile on someone’s face

with a few words of kindness,

wonder, courage and love.

Thank you for listening

to The Voice of Dog.